For more than a decade beginning in 2005, Dolores Delgado Bernal, Ph.D. and her colleague Enrique Alemán followed the trajectory, beginning in kindergarten, of students who were part of a university-school-community partnership aiming to change the school culture and transform educational pathways for the predominantly Latinx immigrant children. Delgado Bernal, who joined the LMU School of Education faculty in January 2023, is returning to that cohort of students—now in their early 20s—to reflect on the impact the groundbreaking partnership had on their lives.
The original longitudinal study, chronicled by Delgado Bernal and Alemán in their 2017 book “Transforming Educational Pathways for Chicana/o Students: A Critical Race Feminista Praxis,” epitomizes a career body of work that culminated in Delgado Bernal’s recognition last April as a 2023 American Educational Research Association (AERA) fellow, in honor of her exemplary contributions to education research. A scholar-activist and first-generation college student, Delgado Bernal’s scholarship draws from Chicana feminist studies and critical race studies to investigate educational (in)equity, Latinx educational pathways, feminista pedagogies, and various forms of student resistance. After starting her career as an elementary school teacher, she served on the faculty at the University of Utah and then at California State University Los Angeles, where she was chair of the Department of Chicana(o) and Latina(o) Studies, and later associate dean of the College of Ethnic Studies.
_with_Margarita_Sanchez_at_the_Belmont_High_School_walkout,_part_of_a_series_of_1968_student_protests_for_education_reform_in_LA (1)-400x319.jpg)
In a recent conversation with SOE, Delgado Bernal touched on her career and discussed the importance of challenging unjust and unequal educational structures.
One of the recurring themes of your work has been how to disrupt normative educational practices to move toward equity for communities of color and other marginalized groups. What needs to be disrupted?
It can be overwhelming to pinpoint because of how the intersection of racism, classism, sexism, heterosexism, and other -isms are embedded in our society. Across the country, we’re seeing a push against allowing disenfranchised voices to come out in shaping who can teach and what can be taught, and of course these issues go way back. Often, there is a deficit way of thinking that affects how young people of color are treated in schools. What we’re pushing back against is often in the air we breathe, and that’s hard to combat.
Where do you think your research has made the most impact?
I’m proud of the empirical work I have done — always in collaboration with others, and especially with early-career scholars. But I think it’s the methodological research that gets the most noticed, and that’s about disrupting traditional research paradigms to ensure they are culturally grounded in the experiences of communities of color. For example, in Latinx communities, pláticas are informal conversations. They have been recognized in the academic literature since the 1970s, but more recently, Chicana/Latina scholars in particular have developed culturally grounded feminista plática methodology. I wrote the first journal article on that methodology with one of my graduate students. And recently, my colleagues and I had a special issue of the International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education in which early-career scholars in particular further develop and redefine a feminista plática methodology. It is a disruption to traditional educational research paradigms.
Some of your earliest work involved oral history research with women who, as high school students, led the 1968 East Los Angeles walkouts — a resistance effort credited with igniting the growth of Chicana/o Studies and other ethnic studies programs. More than 50 years later, what do you see as the legacy of that movement?
It certainly wasn't the beginning of this struggle, but those walkouts in East Los Angeles brought attention to the issue, kicking off walkouts in schools throughout the Southwest in particular. Out of that, we saw more folks running for school boards, more teachers of color entering the field. It’s frustrating, though, because as a society it often feels as if we take two steps forward and then one step back. For the 50th anniversary of those walkouts a few years ago, I reconnected with women who were leaders of the walkouts and were part of my early research. Recently, we worked together with others on an exhibit about Latinx youth movements; it was supposed to be the largest federally funded Smithsonian exhibit on Latina/o civil rights, with one piece of the story focusing on the walkouts. That exhibit was defunded in November 2022 and replaced by one about Salsa. I love Salsa music, but many of us know that this decision was made because it was viewed by some as much less political than talking about the inequities in our communities.
Where do you believe resistance efforts need to be focused today?
It’s multi-pronged. There’s a role for students to play — and sometimes that’s street politics, but other times it’s the resistance of being someone from an immigrant family who is present, learning and succeeding. Beyond students, we need more resistance as a society that looks at how education is funded and says, “This is not enough.” We can have all kinds of innovative projects and pedagogical practices, but if the resources aren’t there, it’s an uphill battle. In our preparation of teachers and educational leaders, we have to make sure folks are thinking about their own positionality in relationship to the communities they're working with. We need to create spaces that allow more immigrant parents and parents of color to be recognized as knowledge producers.
What motivated your interest in going into education and focusing on all of these issues?
I grew up with parents who always pushed education and told me I would go to college, even though no one else in our family had gone. That trajectory of being first-generation, of having a number of family members who ended up in the school-to-prison pipeline when my sister and I didn’t, influenced my decision to go into education. The focus on methodologies and research that help to center voices that have been pushed aside also comes from my upbringing. My grandmothers were storytellers, and I saw how brilliant they were without having a platform.
On the issues you care most about, are you optimistic about future progress?
There are always ebbs and flows. Unfortunately we are in a moment where things are getting worse. It’s disheartening to see the legislation that's being passed in school districts and at the state level that are outright attacks on LGBTQ+ students, on immigrant students, and on what can be taught in schools. But for me, this is a lifelong struggle and journey. And so I have to remain optimistic that ultimately things will get better.